Spammers on Twitter have successfully broken search to the point where it will soon be unusable.

You should make heavy usage of Twitter search.  I’ve written about it before – search is where the real power of Twitter lies.  By using search, you break the ‘walled garden“, letting you find strangers that may be talking about particularly interesting themes (keywords) that you share in common.

For example, when I was at SXSW, I set up a search for the term “driskill”, the name of my hotel (you should be doing this any time you travel).  Late one night, my “driskill” search query picked up this tweet saying: “Anybody staying at or near The Driskill Hotel? I desperately need to borrow a MacBookPro power cord for about an hour I would be very thnkfl”.  I didn’t know this guy, but he needed help so why not. I bailed him out, and a few days later, I’d gained a friend (who happens to be a kick ass photographer) and was able to help someone at the same time.

All of this relies on the notion that search results are inherently ‘correct’, or relevant.  Here’s how it looks like when it’s not:

Since many of us rely on searches (esp. #hashtags), all it takes are a few spammers bombing popular search terms (which can easily be found through services like Twitscoop) to ruin search for good.

So Ev, Biz – I know you’re being slammed by millions of requests to go in thousands of directions, but I think it’s time to think about something that prevents search from degrading into a cesspool of spam.  Perhaps a conversation with Ori Alon is in order?